Sublime

W. E. B. Du Bois

This conceptual duple reflected what W.E.B. Du Bois indelibly voiced in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” Du Bois wrote. He would neither “Africanize America” nor “bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism.”

Du Bois writes, Black Americans remain the perpetual “Other,” always on the outside looking in, ever feeling their “two-ness,” defined not by what they are but by what they can never be.

paradox of identity that Du Bois had made famous among Negro intellectuals more than forty years earlier: “One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings…”